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A History of D&D Video Games - Part IV

After Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering took the world by storm, TSR responded by releasing its own collectable card game called Spellfire. After a promising start, the card game collapsed, leading TSR to try again with Dragon Dice, a collectable dice game. Unfortunately Dragon Dice was an even worse game than Spellfire. The game ended up being far too reliant on random chance and didn't leave room for any player skill. Interplay's Dragon Dice was an absolutely faithful translation of that game -- meaning that players enjoyed the thrilling experience of watching video representations of dice roll around on a screen. At least when you play craps on the Internet, there's a chance of winning real money. The only reason to even own Dragon Dice was to get the exclusive collectable die that came bundled in the package -- which isn't even a reason today as there are very few Dragon Dice players around.

Another bold concept brought down by poor execution. Birthright was the piece of the D&D license snatched up by Sierra, and Gorgon's Alliance would be its one and only D&D game. The Birthright universe was one in which the "Divine Right of Kings" was more than just a figure of speech. All the gods of this world had died, but had passed on their powers to their descendents through their bloodlines. Gorgon's Alliance cast the player as one of these heirs and put him or her in charge of a kingdom. The goal, of course, was to conquer the world via a traditional, map-based strategy game system. The player could also collect sets of adventurers and send them on quests to bring back magic and artifacts that could enhance their abilities or give bonuses to the kingdom.

The problem was, both portions of the game were awful. The strategic part was boring, complicated, and confusing. On the one hand, the game threw so much data at the player it was impossible to get a handle on exactly what the hell was going on. The RPG portion, on the other hand, was built around dated graphics, and boring, repetitive gameplay. Putting the two of them together just made a bad situation worse. Utterly without merit, players justifiably ignored Birthright: Gorgon's Alliance, which eventually sunk into well-deserved obscurity.

Until the release of SSI's Pool of Radiance update a few years later, Descent to Undermountain would go down in history as the most loathed Dungeons & Dragons game ever made. The game was built on the Descent engine, which, while quite hot in 1995, was incredibly dated and ugly in 1998 when Descent to Undermountain was finally released. The story was almost nonexistent, the level design was terrible, the controls were terrible, and the entire field of view had a weird tendency to tilt (a legacy of the free-roaming Descent perspective) and it was as buggy as Hell. All in all, Descent to Undermountain had only one virtue - it made everybody forget about Gorgon's Alliance and the entire previous two years of atrocious Dungeons & Dragons games.

1998

Baldur's GatePublisher: InterplayDeveloper: BioWarePlatforms: PC

Talk about your comebacks! Anticipation for Baldur's Gate was at a fever pitch almost from the moment it was announced. The CRPG community and D&D fans, accustomed to being burned by lackluster games and titles that attempted to bring the D&D license into other styles of gameplay. BioWare, on the other hand, promised it was going to return to old-school RPG gameplay, albeit with hot new graphics. The one fly in the ointment was when BioWare announced that it was going to drop the traditional, turn-based system, in favor of a real-time, "order when paused" system that was brand new. While objections were raised by hardcore fans who felt that real-time gameplay would ruin the experience, BioWare stuck to its game design guns and delivered exactly what it promised.

Good thing, too, because Baldur's Gate was a spectacular success. It not only managed to capture the D&D magic in a way that gamers hadn't experienced since the Pool of Radiance days, it went those old games one better by incorporating aspects of D&D that would have been impossible just a few years earlier. For the first time, your party members were actual people with their own personalities and agendas. Alignment meant something as how you treated people that showed up in your dialogue choices and the way the story played out. Character position and strategy finally came into play during heated battles. Baldur's Gate was a triumph the single-handedly revived the CRPG and almost made gamers forgive Interplay for Descent to Undermountain.